from the archive: forever chasing shadows - what happens when we look into the darkness?

my ongoing photography obsession: the magic of darkness playing with light

the lanes in town are extra beautiful when the shadows come to play

Every month I remove the paywall from an archive post and share it just like this. If you’re enjoying Haver & Sparrow I’d be delighted if you’d consider supporting my work through a paid subscription or try a 7-day free trial if you’d like to have a look around first. Access to the full archive is one of the benefits along with extra letters such as voice notes and writing prompts - plus more ways to connect to come! 🖤

This post was first published on 21st May 2023.

Hello lovely

There’s a new season of light here in Shetland and daytime is stretching further and further into the night. We’re moving closer to the Summer Solstice in June, a day when there’s only a thin veil of dusk and no solid darkness appears to signify nighttime. The dreamy light of ‘golden hour’ now lasts the whole evening and there’s no sudden transition to end the day, the sun’s glow just dissolves ever-so-slowly into the night sky. 

But it’s not just the light I’m chasing at this time of year: I’m more excited about the shadows. 

I’ve been fascinated by shadows for as long as I can remember. Maybe my first awareness of their magic was watching my Granpa turn the darkness into a story when he did shadow puppetry. I would watch in disbelief as he curled one hand around the other, twisted one finger here or there, and suddenly made a bird fly across the wall. He would make birds, dogs, and rabbits dance out of the bedside lamp and I was in awe of how the darkness came alive in his hands.

I never learned to make the animals as well as my Granpa, just the one slightly wonky bird. Instead my hands use a camera to bring the darkness to life. I’m forever trying to capture nature’s shadow puppets whether it’s the leaves of a tree swayings across the floor or a scene that’s fully in shadow apart from one sliver, one pocket of light. The light and the dark play together in a camera just as my Granpa’s hands played with the light beside my bed. Either way, I think it’s magic.

While we tend to think of them as part of the darkness, shadows can’t exist without the light. Essentially, they’re a beautiful kind of failure. If the light is unable to get to the wall it’s reaching for because of an obstacle, say a plant on your windowsill, a shadow glides across the wall as a result. A shadow is both there are not there: it’s the shape of a thing but it’s not a thing itself. It can move, sway, curve, and dance but it’s intangible, untouchable, and temporary. It can come and go as the sun passes through a cloud; it can appear in many shades from a barely there grey to a solid charcoal.

Our instinct, usually very sensibly, is to turn towards the light, away from the shadows and the darkness which is an instinct of self-preservation. When it’s dark an unseen threat could be lurking in those shadowy places. Even when it comes to our internal world, darkness is used as a way to describe the most negative parts of ourselves and our minds. Carl Jung called this inner darkness the “shadow self” and explained it as “the thing a person has no wish to be”. These are the parts we feel a pressure to keep hidden, to feel ashamed of, or even to feel afraid of in case they break out into the world and show people a side of ourselves we’d rather conceal.

These internal conflicts have been played out across literature and psychology for centuries - it’s the classic good vs evil narrative, isn’t it? In the novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson warns against trying to suppress our darker side too fiercely as this can inadvertently make it stronger. In the case of Hyde, this results in the worst possible act of self-sabotage as he becomes strong enough to kill the good side of Jekyll along with himself.

So what if we take a counterintuitive approach and turn towards the shadows instead? 

Sylvia Plath, who was no stranger to the most crippling internal darkness, wrote beautifully about shadows in The Bell Jar: “I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.” There’s something haunting and mysterious about these lines, a foreboding, perhaps? But there’s also something comforting and delightful in the idea that the darkest thing might also be “the most beautiful thing in the world.”

There are stories to be told in that moment where the light meets the dark: monsters may loiter in the shadows but so does magic. Photographing shadows reminds me of that magic and I’m bewitched every time I see the darkness flirt with the light. It also reminds me that perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the darker parts of ourselves: there’s beauty to be found in our shadow selves too, perhaps the most beautiful parts of all. Most importantly, having a shadow shows us that we’re standing in the light.

Do you find magic in the shadows? I’d love to hear about your thoughts and any shadow puppet talents you may be hiding…

Take good care

PS If you’d like to see more of my photos - and say hello! - I’d love to be friends with you on Instagram too. You can find here: @haverandsparrow. 📸